


Sunlight

by RoryKurago



Series: Songs Of The Golden Age [2]
Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Genre: 1940s, F/M, Post-Narnia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-26 20:29:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20395699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: After returning from Narnia for the last time, Peter muses on threads of gold in the hair of a passing girl at the train station.





	Sunlight

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2010 for a 100 Themes Challenge: #85 - Sunlight

Sunlight picked lines of gold through Norwegian milkmaid braids. That was the first clue that the girl wasn’t English. It was a crisp morning outside the train station, Peter was on his way to school, and his wife was walking the opposite direction arm-in-arm with another girl. Or not his wife. But not an English girl, despite the uniform.

The girls laughed at some joke or story and then she looked back. There, in those slanted dark eyes: a knowing joy. A steady beat of love.

Not his wife, but her soul. She knew who she was, who he was, and what they were. Peter didn’t run to her; there was time ahead. It was early days yet, and they had never officially spoken.

He caught Susan’s sleeve. Wrinkling her brow, she told him the companion was a schoolmate; not a particular friend of Susan’s, but well enough for Susan to be apprised of the happening when the girl’s Irish cousin came down to stay. Anne Something. How long she was to stay wasn’t specified, but it would be quite some time.

Susan narrowed her eyes. "What are you up to now, Peter?"

He shook his head peaceably and released her arm.

He only had to look at the girl to know with his whole being – heart, body, soul – who she was. It was as if they had never been apart. He thought he might have known who she was even before she existed in this world, as though he’d only been waiting for her to appear.

She knew before he did. She’d come here knowing. She smiled even as her cousin led away her away by the elbow—smiled like they shared a secret, and Peter only had to realise that she was here to know it.

In an instant he saw their future laid out before him like the white limestone path through the orchard:

Himself leaning in the alcove by the brick gates of St Finnbar’s. Stepping out with hand upheld for hers.

They walked together from the gate, uniforms brushing as they talked of inconsequential things from the day. Muttering from the other boys at the gate sprang up behind them. Anne stole Peter’s hat to muss his fringe the way she liked it – not accepting this neatly-brushed schoolboy comb – and Peter swooped down to kiss the laughter from her eyes. He would absorb it by diffusion and carry a coil of its warmth inside him, powered by it for the rest of time. He would never be cold again.

When holding hands wasn’t enough, they stood side by side on the railway platform, waiting for their train, and kissed chastely on the lips. Only chastely. This was public, and they were young yet. At her stop, Anne had to get off and return to her cousin’s house. But absence made the heart grow fonder, and he would only be missing her until the next day. The train ride home made him feel warm inside as the coil of laughter sent out waves that resonated softly through him.

Lucy was ecstatic to see Eliaahn so real and present, even if it took her a moment and more than a few tentative touches to gather the wits to simply throw her arms around Anne. Edmund too embraced her, although without the wondrous hesitation of Lucy. Peter watched this hawklike, back stiff, noting every crease in Anne’s school sweater that showed just how she was being molded to his newly-hormonal brother’s body. But he didn’t break it up; he had some faith in Edmund, after all. Their mother didn’t understand, but she accepted the bright, polite girl as a friend of Lucy and Edmund; and smiled knowingly at Peter’s watchful eye, even if she found the lack of awkwardness or even adolescent reticence confusing.

They went out for coffee at a small café, and Anne extolled the virtues of oranges and chocolate at length. Peter listened with an indulgent ear and wondered what the flavours would taste like scoured off her tongue. Sometimes a teasing kiss on the cheek, or even the lips, wasn’t enough but they agreed that waiting would make their complete reunion sweeter. (And more legal.)

It only lasted until the others’ muttering became an outcry: why did _he_ get a steady girlfriend first crack at her? She was plenty pretty to make the rounds; Peter hadn’t even given them a chance to put in their say for themselves.

She wasn’t interested anyway, Peter knew, but the point was that they were trying to fight him for daring to be with his _wife_.

He punched one of the larger ones in the eye, knocking him down. Anne stepped in before he could do more damage, wrapping her arms around him and telling him that they were less than not worth it. They just didn’t understand. It was time to go now.

Peter went quietly. She was right: they were just little boys. They didn’t have nearly the experience and connected wisdom he and Anne, or Susan, Edmund, or Lucy did.

They were eighteen before Anne met Peter at the door of her cousin’s house with a coy, carefully restrained smile in the early hours of the morning and helped him to carry the picnic basket to the Pevensie car. (Peter had first dibs on it, obviously, being a worldly young man of eighteen and the most motile of the family—although he ran Susan over to her part-time job with the WREN every Saturday.)

The drive out into the countryside was sedate and relaxed, and once again they talked of inconsequential things and Anne laughingly told Peter of the fuss her cousin was putting up about a marriage proposal from an American airman. A different American in smart Dress Blues proposed to _Anne_ at a dance one evening, until an exasperated and only mildly irritated Peter stepped in to tell the young man that he was drunk, bothering the lady, and to kindly step away.

They spent the afternoon doing justice to the picnic, and then lay back, full and satisfied. The lunch had been packed by Anne’s aunt; Peter jocularly complimented the woman on her spectacular chicken salad. Anne lay on her side, cheek braced in a palm and the other arm draped over her waist. She watched Peter wriggle into a more comfortable position with a familiar smile. Flat on his back, Peter was suddenly aware of the floral print of her dress, and the way the shoestring ties at the waist accentuated the pinch of her body. How the angled curve of her hip looked like the hills of the Lone Islands. She had bare feet and loose hair, and her freckles had stubbornly refused to fade over the years as the Pevensies’ mother always misguidedly assured her they would.

She was just as compliant and lithe as Peter remembered when he reached across the rug for her, crawling willingly into his arms. It was now more than two years since they had been wholly together; more than two hundred since it was in a spirit of love and mutual appreciation, because the night beneath the Howe was tainted with just a little too much desperation, loss, and bitterness to be anything but a bittersweet memory.

The afternoon sun filtered through the trees in a lacework pattern more beautiful than the finest wrought iron or dwarven crown, warming their chests and sides as they lay together. Peter wondered if that was only because of the canvas the pattern was painted on, and traced the shapes with his fingers. He considered them at length before following the fingers’ trail with his tongue. Anne rolled off his side and onto her back, pulling him with her.

He called her ‘Ahn’ between themselves. Everyone who heard this thought it was a quirk. But it didn’t matter what everybody else thought of them. Anne jokingly inquired what ‘High King Peter’ made of things on occasion. Susan, Edmund and Lucy shook their heads at the sometime giddiness of the one-time Most Dignified Couple in Narnian history. They put it down to a return of the ‘young’ clause in ‘young love’.

A few years after this, Peter kissed the knuckle of her finger after sliding the new gold band over it and pulled her down to the rug with him. The light lacework was thicker now. Dark lines branded their skin as they privately renewed their wedding vows on the picnic rug by the small silver lake. The public renewal – or forging, to everyone else – could wait until a more agreeable time. He was twenty-three.

A train whistle shrilled and Peter sighed at being called back to the present where he was sixteen. At the gates of the station, Anne turned her head in a sunbeam. For a moment, she was crowned in gold.

Then it was gone. She and her cousin checked the road both ways and then dashed laughingly across through a break in traffic. One car honked. For a moment, Peter considered going after them.

But, no. It was too early. They had never officially spoken; someone would have to introduce them. It would be too strange to suddenly announce that one was stepping out with a person one supposedly hadn’t met.

“Oh, blast,” said Susan. “We missed the lights.”

On the other side of the road, Anne looked back. Peter stood with hands in his pockets against the cold and ignored the schoolboy squabbles around him, waiting for the next cycle.

“Susan,” he said, “I need you to do something for me.” She looked at him askance, and then squinted across the road.

Peter paid it no mind. He was already musing on threads of gold woven at the crown of her head like the real thing, and basking in the memory of her lips on his.


End file.
